| Two animal protection organizations, United Poultry Concerns
(UPC) and the Association of Veterinarians for Animal Rights (AVAR),
criticized the treatment that many California residents and their
companion birds are receiving at the hands of men representing the
Task Force of the California Department of Food and Agriculture
(CDFA).
Under an order to eradicate Exotic Newcastle Disease (END), an
epidemic virus originating in birds bred for cockfighting in Mira
Loma, where it could have been stopped from spreading in October
according to Norco Animal Control Officer Renee Powers, the task
force is “terrorizing innocent families and their defenseless
birds.”
Powers said “one Norco woman suffered a nervous breakdown
when men from the task force killed her two parrots before her eyes
after pretending to ‘test’ them for END in a contaminated
death truck parked outside her house.”
Norco resident Randy Walker, who is appealing the state’s
plan to kill his backyard flock of 200 birds showing no sign of
the disease, told The Press Enterprise on January 31 that
he was badgered on his property by the CDFA Task Force on January
22nd. According to Walker, a task force worker told him “he
had no right to appeal and threatened to have him arrested if he
attempted to stop the killing.”
Walker’s neighbors, Mike and Sue Swallow, told UPC in an email
correspondence that they attended a town meeting about END on January
23 “where Walker described the previous day’s appearance
at his door of thirty-one task force men prepared, in full view
of his family, to catch their birds, tape their legs together, put
each one in a plastic bag, and gas them with carbon dioxide or shoot
them to death with pellet guns.” Walker told the meeting the
task force said they were going to bludgeon his family’s emu
because the bird was too big for a bag.
More than 81,000 backyard birds have so far been brutally destroyed,
and 285,000 more birds are scheduled to be bludgeoned, shot, and
gassed, “euthanized,” according to The Press Enterprise
on January 31, 2003.
“The mentality of ‘test and slaughter’ is inappropriate
for infected or exposed chickens and other captive birds,”
states Nedim C. Buyukmihci, VMD, President of the Association of
Veterinarians for Animal Rights and Professor of Veterinary Medicine
at the University of California, Davis. “Since wild birds
can also be carriers and spread the disease, are we to slaughter
all of them, too? A better approach would be to isolate via quarantine
all affected poultry flocks and to apply vaccination and common-sense
sanitation precautions. We would never ‘test and slaughter’
human beings. To do so with other beings is ethically and biologically
inconsistent.”
If the mass-extermination approach to eradicating Newcastle Disease
in the early 1970s is predictive, millions of birds, tax dollars,
and human resources will be pointlessly sacrificed over the next
few years, a prospect not entirely unwelcome to the egg industry,
which has been trying to reduce the U.S. flock size for years. “They’d
be crying all the way to the bank” if their chickens were
stricken, one poultry producer told the Los Angeles Times.
“The filth, squalor, and stress imposed on birds by the cockfighting
industry and the exhausting demands of commercial egg and chicken
production guarantee infectious disease,” says United Poultry
Concerns President Karen Davis. “You treat living creatures
like trash, you have no welfare regulations for the birds, and this
is what you get -- sickness, suffering, and death on a grand scale
that will ultimately affect people.”
For information and updates on Exotic Newcastle Disease (END):
http://www.cocka2.com/newcastle
http://www.aphis.usda.gov/lpa/issues/enc/vnd.html
The Association of Veterinarians for Animal Rights is a nonprofit
organization committed to balancing the needs of nonhuman animals
with those of human animals. http://www.AVAR.org
United Poultry Concerns is a nonprofit organization that promotes
the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl.
http://www.UPC-online.org.
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